Wimbledon, England – A trickle.
That’s what set it up.
At the end of almost three hours of tennis between Andy Roddick and Thomas Johansson – stretched across three tiebreakers and two days – the ball perched itself on the net for a blink … and might have taken a teeny roll to the left before falling to the other side.
It was the point amid all the power and retrievals that finally gave Roddick a chance to win a Wimbledon men’s semifinal Saturday, which he did immediately on a blast of a serve Johansson could reach but couldn’t return.
Thus ended Roddick’s 6-7 (6-8), 6-2, 7-6 (12-10), 7-6 (7-5) odyssey for a place in today’s championship match against two-time defending champion Roger Federer in a rematch of last year’s pairing at the All England Club.
“It was lucky. I felt guilty about it for a second, but then I got over it,” said the second-seeded Roddick, whose forehand service return teased all of Centre Court before toppling over to give him a match point. “I hit a good, solid chip, which would have been a decent return. The timing of it couldn’t have been better for me.”
The match itself was exquisite entertainment.
It resumed after Friday’s postponement because of rain and darkness with the 12th-seeded Johansson serving at 5-6 in the first set. He held to force the tiebreaker, which he won by capturing its last four points – the first two with Roddick on set points – to close it out.
“It’s tough coming out of the locker room and all of a sudden getting thrown into the boiler of a tiebreaker in the semifinal of Wimbledon when you’ve been on the court about 3 1/2 minutes,” Roddick said of the high-pressure start to the resumption of play.
He recovered, obviously, but little of it was easy.
Roddick got two quick breaks of serve in the second set, and bludgeoned through from there on a powerful serve to even the match.
Everything else, though, was a struggle.
Roddick broke at 5-5 in the third set, but Johansson got it right back (his only break of serve of the match) to force another tiebreaker. That one featured six set points – three for each player – before Roddick won it when Johansson’s lunging forehand service return went into the net.
The fourth set featured not so much as a break-point opportunity for either player, and the tiebreaker went to 5-5 with Roddick and Johansson each sweeping his service points to that juncture.
Then came the net cord.
Then came the finish.
By the end, Roddick, who somewhere along the line slipped on a section of the court worn bare coming up dirty from shirt to shorts, looked for all the world like one of his beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers football players.
Now, he tackles the top-seeded and top-ranked Federer. It will be the first back-to-back rematch on the men’s side since Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker played each other for the title three consecutive years (1988-90).
“There’s no questioning he’s been a better player over the last two years,” said Roddick, who was a loser in four sets in the 2004 Wimbledon title match. “That’s a given. No one would argue otherwise. I have to be better (today) … not for the next 10 years … not for the next whatever. I have to be better (today).”
Even that will be difficult.
Federer is 8-1 for his career and 2-0 at Wimbledon against Roddick, and carries a 35-match winning streak overall on grass.
Which might be why Federer called the assignment with Roddick “a classic matchup.”
Roddick went so far as to suggest he can’t imagine “if many people are expecting me to win.”
So, he said, he plans to “play free and go after him. I’m going to at least try to take it to him a little bit.”
Whatever aggressiveness Roddick manages to construct will come off his huge serve, which he said “started clicking” the past couple of matches. Roddick had 19 aces without a double-fault in beating Johansson, and neither did he double-fault in a five-set semifinal win against Sebastien Grosjean.
“I don’t remember the last time I made it through nine sets in this type intensity without dumping some serves,” Roddick said.
Yet he joked about how his best tactic might be to dump Federer, literally.
“We get along really well,” said Roddick, who holds Federer in considerable personal regard for what he has called classy behavior off the court. “We always have a good laugh when we see each other in the locker room (and) I try to push him over and injure him.
“Yeah, you know, I might try to push him into a wall or something before we go on the court.”
Just a nudge.
Roddick already knows what a trickle can do.